Digital Dictionary

E

Eco-digital Responsibility

Jean-Yves Jeannas¹ and Marie Cauli²

¹ AFUL, Université de Lille, France

² Université d’Artois, Arras, France

The use of digital technology is now an integral part of our daily lives. If we can see the beneficial aspects of this evolution, we can also see the undesirable effects on our lives and on our environment. By optimizing manufacturing or management processes, digital technology has long been presented as allowing environmental gains, such as the “zero paper” objective linked to digitalization. However, the figures have toned down these claims. They show that the surging wave of digitization and the exponential growth of digital uses, accompanied by an inflationary supply of consumption, have accelerated and amplified energy consumption and environmental impacts. However, they are ignored as such by the general public, who have difficulty understanding the lifecycle of the infrastructures that condition the technical equipment with which everyone is equipped today. Thus, we all too often forget, when we handle them, that dematerialized exchanges only exist by relying on material infrastructures, consisting of terminals, computer centers and networks that are far from the image of an impalpable sector. What is certain is that there is nothing immaterial behind the operation of the digital sector and that energy consumption is very real, with the exploitation of natural resources and the impacts linked to the manufacture of equipment, transport, ...